Un Entendre
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"We're here to buy some smoked ham! Ha! Ha! Ha!" —Greeting card.
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Double Entendres are a staple of comedy. Characters are so used to double meanings and innuendos flying all over the place, in fact, that sometimes they jump the gun and assume everything someone says is a Double Entendre (probably because Freud Was Right). It can take a few moments for them to realize that they don't actually know what other meaning "put some parsley on the chicken" is supposed to have. It just felt like it did.
Definitely Truth in Television. We've all done it or had it done to us at some point.[1]
Compare Imagined Innuendo, Accidental Innuendo and Is That What They're Calling It Now?. Contrast Entendre Failure. Can be used for Double Entendres.
No real life examples, please; we'd be here all day.
Anime and Manga
- One of these kicks off Hanamaru Kindergarten. In the first episode, one of the main characters, a 4-year-old girl, is standing alone along on the side of the street. Another main character, a male kindergarten teacher, comes by on his bike and asks the little girl, "Excuse me, Ojou-chan. What are you doing here?" "Ojou-chan" essentially means "Miss" or "Little lady". Not an unusual way to address a young girl whom one does not know. Anzu, the girl, has a very active imagination, however, and she jumps to the conclusion that he's hitting on her. He turns out to be her teacher at kindergarten and the misunderstanding persists. Hilarity Ensues.
Comic Books
- In X-Factor:
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Ruby: So, did you do him? |
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- The punchline of the Finnbarr Saunders strip in Viz would be that, after Finnbarr had spent a page desperately finding double entendres in everything, the other two characters would go off and have sex and Finnbarr would assume that they were doing something completely innocuous.
Film (Animated)
- "It's Raining Sunshine" by Miranda Cosgrove, from Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. If it's yellow and it's raining, it ain't sunshine.
Film (Live Action)
- Blades of Glory had this exchange:
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Jimmy: Get out of my face! |
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Literature
- A Running Gag in A Song of Ice and Fire involves Shagga, son of Dolf, and his threats to cut people's "manhoods" off and feed them to goats. Shagga is in fact referring to beards when he says that, which Grandmaester Pycelle discovers to his dismay.
Live-Action TV
- In one Wings episode, Antonio (played by Tony Shalhoub) gleefully attempts to participate in stereotypical American male sex-humor with the guys just after the vixen seducing him beckons him to her room:
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Antonio: Oh, man. We're going to go upstairs and 'have sex' if you know what I mean. |
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- In one How I Met Your Mother episode, Marshall and Lily had this exchange:
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Marshall: It's breakfast time in China. |
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- In another episode, Marshall comes home from work, ready to have sex with Lily, and this dialogue ensues:
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Lily: A package just arrived. |
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- Given equal parts lampshading and subversion in an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000, when Joel instructs the 'bots that the art of entendre "isn't so much what you say, but how you say it".
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Servo: Hey, Joel. We've got... commercial sign. Heh heh heh... |
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- Sometimes, the entendres are implied to be about to occur, but then avoided entirely, see Riding With Death, Where a spinning number dial gets to 69:
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Servo: Hey, guys, it's my favorite number! Woo-hoo! |
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- This trope is the only reason The Todd exists as a character on Scrubs.
- In-your-end-o!
- In an episode of Arrested Development Tobias Fünke uses peculiar phrases when trying to say that he accidentally used a gift card whilst thinking it was just a preview of what he could get for it.
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Tobias: Well, yes, but I’m afraid I prematurely shot my wad on what was supposed to be a dry run, if you will, so now I’m afraid I have something of a mess on my hands. |
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- Tobias is made of this trope, and it's lampshaded more than once.
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Tobias: Oh, Tobias, you blowhard. |
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- A classic example from Friends;
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Joey: [sexy voice] There's always room for Jell-O... |
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- Whose Line Is It Anyway? occasionally has this during the game "If You Know What I Mean", where everything is supposed to be a double entendre followed by "if you know what I mean", but occasionally one of the others will answer a particularly obscure line with "No, I don't know what that means". It's all Rule of Funny.
- A notorious example is Colin's "fluff my Garfield". Which then went on to become the new innuendo of choice on the show.
- An example from Community:
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Jeff: Hey! Troy sneezes like a girl! |
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Puppet Shows
- In It's a Very Merry Muppet Christmas Movie, Pepe becomes Rachel Bitterman's assistant and assumes everything she says is a come on... eventually annoying her into to saying "You know... not everything is an innuendo!"
- He then assumes that the word "innuendo" is itself an innuendo.
Video Games
- Oghren makes some of these when talking about weapons in Party Banter in Dragon Age Origins. Varric and Isabela also do this at one point in party banter in Dragon Age II.
- For the record, Varric and Isabela were talking about knives. Well, technically daggers, but Varric can never remember the difference.
- Uncharted 3 lampshades that Sully manages to make everything sound like some sort of innuendo.
Web Original
- An article in The Onion featured a person who tried to make an innuendo about a colleague looking after a co-worker's plants while she was on holiday. It was pointed out that 'I'll bet you'll "water her plants" while she's away' cannot be an innuendo as no sexual action whatsoever can take place between the two.
Web Comics
- Happens in this Sluggy Freelance strip:
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Riff: How did your blind date go? |
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- Or the one where the Nanite Queen says she'll eat Sam's brain, and Sam assumes it's slang for something naughty. She meant it literally.
- Sam and Fuzzy has an example of this when Fuzzy rattles off a string of euphemisms after Sam's first date with Candice. Sam treats them straight, but the reader immediately discovers that Fuzzy is still under the influence of his home-made hallucinogens and all his euphemisms refer to things he is hallucinating.
- Fun fact from The Whiteboard: "Brass nipples" are an actual component of a marker.
Western Animation
- Archer: Charles: "where have you been all night"
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Archer: "Way the Christ out in the Everglades burying some Dominican guy's rooster!" |
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- ↑ fnarr fnarr